Equality impact assessments

As a public body we must carry out equality impact assessments on all new policies, procedures, projects and services, to prevent unfair discrimination.

The equality impact assessment focuses on 9 areas:

age

disability

faith

sex

sex reassignment

marriage and civil partnership

pregnancy and maternity

race

sexual orientation.

An equality impact assessment should be used to anticipate and identify the impacts of new policies, procedures, projects or services on these areas.

Managers should then make sure that any potential negative consequences are removed or balanced out by either changing the policy, procedure, project or service or introducing other measures alongside it.

There are 2 stages to equality impact assessment:

initial screening - a quick overview of a policy, procedure or service to assess relevance to equality and to see if any low level action can be taken to change the likely impact of a decision on a particular group

full impact assessment - a longer piece of work which relies on the findings of the initial screening to research and take action where impacts are judged to be unknown or are considered to be major.